Theoretical Prediction of Non-Hermitian Skin Effect in Ultracold Atom Systems

Abstract: Non-Hermitian skin effect, which refers to the phenomenon that an extensive number of eigenstates are localized at the boundary, has been widely studied in lattice models and experimentally observed in several classical systems. In this work, we predict that the existence of the non-Hermitian skin effect in the dissipative ultracold fermions with spin-orbit coupling, a continuous model that has been implemented by the Hong-Kong group in a recent experiment. This skin effect is robust against the variation of external parameters and trapping potentials. We further reveal a dynamic sticky effect in our system, which has a common physical origin with the non-Hermitian skin effect. Our work paves the way for studying novel physical responses of non-Hermitian skin effect in quantum systems.